New Project on the ZEC Track, Vitalik's Only Coin Purchase in Two Years

In the midst of a blazing market, Vitalik has finally made a move after 2 years.

Last month, Vitalik participated in the first-round CCA public auction of The Interfold on Uniswap, investing 16 ETH (approximately $28,000). Vitalik's last significant public investment in a new project token or related asset dates back to November 2024 when he put in 32 ETH (about $107,000) in an NFT public sale on the Truemarkets prediction market.

On August 19, $FOLD conducted its TGE and subsequently saw a peak increase of over 7x. This price surge needs to be looked at in two segments. On August 23, Upbit listed $FOLD, instantly doubling the price and briefly reaching a market capitalization of around $230 million. Prior to this, the price surge relied heavily on the narrative of "Vitalik bought," with on-chain players forming a consensus around this narrative, driving the token's market cap from about $28 million to a peak of around $140 million.

Following this sudden positive development of Upbit listing, $FOLD did not continue to rise with the market but retraced to its pre-news position. Therefore, we can roughly say that the token has returned to the value range of the "Vitalik bought" narrative:

In fact, the "Vitalik bought" narrative associated with $FOLD is greater than imagined. This is a privacy-focused project, an open-source privacy protocol developed by Gnosis Guild, which enables multiple unrelated parties to jointly perform verifiable computations and produce shared results without revealing private inputs, relying on a single operator, or using trusted hardware.

For example, in the case of a DAO, anyone can vote privately, with no one able to see individual vote records. However, everyone can verify the authenticity of the final voting results.

Encrypted input data is submitted to the protocol's secure computation environment, E3. Each computation involving encrypted data creates a separate E3. After the computation is complete, the E3 is shut down, leaving no data traces.

Nodes performing ciphertext computation and decryption need to stake $FOLD to qualify.

Comparing with ZEC, ZEC itself is a privacy-focused asset, while The Interfold is a multi-party privacy computation protocol that allows each party involved in a task to collaborate without sharing their data to complete the task together. When imagining practical use cases, this can feel quite hardcore, especially in terms of the demand for privacy protection.

That is to say, in terms of the ease of accepting the narrative, ZEC is very simple, like "privacy version of Bitcoin, no one sees where my money is going." But The Interfold is more challenging to understand. Vitalik was very direct in promoting this project on X at the end of May this year, and just looking at the reasons he recommended it shows that it's not easy to grasp...

At DappCon in July this year, Vitalik again mentioned this project live:

In addition, Vitalik bid 16 ETH in a public auction, but he has not yet claimed the tokens received from the sale, let alone sold them. Based on the various performances mentioned above, it can be said that players are not concerned about what The Interfold can specifically be used for. Just knowing that Vitalik is optimistic about it, has repeatedly mentioned it, and has invested his own money in it is enough.

As for how this coin will perform in the future, I am personally optimistic. First of all, it is difficult to compare with Vitalik's previous participation in the Truemarkets prediction market because when $TRUE TGE was launched last year, the market environment cannot be compared with now, and $TRUE has not been listed on any exchange, large or small.

The peak fully diluted valuation (FDV) of $TRUE has not exceeded $20 million, while $FOLD now is approximately 27% liquid, with a circulating market cap of about $27 million and an FDV of around $100 million. As a target listed on Upbit shortly after the TGE, from this perspective, there seems to be room for $FOLD.

For a project that Vitalik himself has funded, in terms of short- to medium-term speculation, it can be assumed that he will not sell. On Truemarkets, regardless of the current price low or the peak in October last year, he has always held. The narrative of "Vitalik bought" will continue for $FOLD, especially since he himself keeps mentioning it repeatedly; the probability of the narrative changing to "Vitalik sold" overnight is indeed low.

Secondly, while this project is a legitimate privacy protocol project, there is nothing wrong with taking a meme coin approach from a publicity perspective. The bullish factors we can now list, such as ETH's strength, overall on-chain market sentiment, listing on Upbit, Vitalik's repeated mentions, etc., are actually all about attention logic. The bet is that in a situation where overall liquidity is good, ETH will also be chased by everyone as a hot asset.

The project's technology and use case itself are relatively difficult to understand, which means that for most on-chain players, the attracting point will not be the technology and the use case itself, but the various attention-driven factors mentioned above.

However, in a scenario where various chains such as Robinhood, BSC, and Solana have shown good profit-taking effects, speculating on a circulating market cap that is already close to $30 million, and on an asset on the ETH mainnet that currently lacks popularity, is it being ahead of the curve or is it too niche? It is hard to judge at this point. In the current situation, even though $FOLD has Vitalik's support, the odds may not be that attractive.

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